3 Mobile are following in the footsteps of both Orange, Vodafone and AOL by wading into the free laptop battle with all guns blazing. The new deals from 3 see customers able to pick and choose from three differently specced Hewlett-Packard lappies available on a number of the higher end £30 monthly Mobile Broadband contracts from 3.

The three offers (no pun intended) are as follows:

• An HP 530 laptop with 1GB of memory, a 120GB hard drive and Vista Home Basic – available on an 18 month contract from £35 per month or a 24 month contract from £30 per month.
• An HP 2133 laptop with 1GB of memory, a 120GB hard drive and Vista Home Basic – available on a 24 month contract from £35 per month.
• An HP DV6910 Pavilion laptop with 3GB of memory, a 250GB hard drive and Vista Home Basic – available on a 24 month contract from £40 per month.

A 3 Mobile USB modem comes included with all of the laptop deals – customer can pick and choose between black and white versions of the Stick modems, which currently allow users to connect at speeds of up to 3.6Mbps. All in all, the cost of the contracts against the retail value of each of the machines at the time of writing sees you saving a couple of hundred pounds if you were to buy a similarly powered machine and sign up to the 3 Mobile Broadband plans, which are similar to the Plus 18 Month and Plus 24 Month plans, albeit with a faster potential download speed.

Carphone Warehouse has invested £3million in training staff to sell laptops effectively. The broadband and mobile phone retailer is aiming to sell 1 million laptops a year.

The six-week intensive training programme concludes with an exam. Members of staff who pass the test have been promised an Acer laptop worth £350 as an incentive. Those who fail will not be allowed to sell laptops in a customer-facing role. The company found that while staff members who owned mobiles were able to draw on their own experiences when selling, most sales assistants could not afford a laptop so did not have the knowledge to back up their sales pitch.

“In training we give them real good basic knowledge about the things that make the laptops different form each other, why people might want a particular model, what needs it might solve, which ones have parental control, which don’t, and so on,” said Andrew Harrison, Chief Executive of Carphone UK.

The training programme comes as the retailer seeks to expand its customer base beyond its traditional mobile phone market, in order to protect itself against potential negative consequences of the current downturn in the economy. Mr Harrison said that more and more people require laptops to gain access to popular social networking sites.

“Prices of laptops are coming down, people want to do instant messaging and Facebook and most of them want to do it on a laptop,” he said. “We are about to go through same growth curve in laptops as we did in mobiles and if we are to enter this market we have to knowledgeable, credible staff and that means a huge investment in our people and training so they can give customers advice about which product is best for their needs.”

As part of its Wireless World proposition, launched last month, the company is stocking six laptops within each of its 809 UK stores. Brands stocked include from Acer, Fujitsu Siemens, Toshiba and EPC, and start from free to £249 if purchased with a mobile broadband contract from Carphone’s own brands TalkTalk and AOL, as well as Orange, T-Mobile and 3. Last year Carphone offered a free Dell laptop to new AOL subscribers.

Millions of rural customers are still being denied access to affordable broadband, according to figures published by comparison website moneysupermarket.com. In broadband blackspots where no local loop unbundled (LLU) lines have been installed, rural customers are paying up to £15 more for their broadband per month compared with their city-dwelling counterparts. This is another blow for broadband users in rural areas, who already have to endure much slower connections than those who live in an urban environment.

According to the website 12 million homes are in Tiscali’s broadband blackspot, costing them an extra £8 a month, and 10 million homes are denied access to AOL’s LLU lines, meaning they must pay £10 a month on top of the normal rate.

The research comes after a report last month from the telecoms watchdog Oftel and the Countryside Agency, which confirmed that customers living in large cities were far more likely to have access to high-speed ASDL. About 90% of city centres and 52% of suburbs in the UK are connected with ASDL, compared to just 11% of market towns and 6% of villages.

Similarly 70% of urban centres have cable broadband, but only 11% of market towns and 1% of villages.BT is currently extending its ASDL network, aiming for 80% coverage across the UK by the end of the year. However, rural locations will still most likely miss out, since laying ASDL lines in the countryside is deemed uneconomical.

“We have hundreds of relatively small exchanges across the country and it’s very difficult to find a commercially viable way to broadband enable them, but we’re working on it,” said a spokesperson for BT. Meanwhile local MPs are pushing broadband providers to get a move on when it comes to bringing high-speed broadband to rural areas.

Vodafone have reportedly done a volte face and pulled out of their bid to take over the residential broadband, home phone and digital TV services of triple-play provider Tiscali, according to the Financial Times.

Reportedly, the two companies failed to agree on a sum which would see Vodafone acquiring Tiscali’s broadband businesses not only in the UK, but across Europe as well. The map to the right shows the extent of Tiscali’s continental reach. Lime green indicates countries where Tiscali operates independently, and the purple countries are markets where the Tiscali brand is present, but the company does not wholly own the service provided, like the AOL/Carphone Warehouse situation here in the UK.

Speaking of Charles Dunston and the gang, Carphone also dropped out of the Tiscali bidding war back in May. This leaves Sky, Swisscom and fellow Italian comms provider Wind Telecomunicazioni.

EDIT: The map wouldn’t display for some reason in the original post. The bug has been fixed, and now you can witness it in all its cartographic glory.

Carphone Warehouse are poised to cash in on the rising popularity of mobile broadband services today with the launch of their new free laptop deals. In addition to the same AOLFree Laptop deal currently doing the rounds on this very site, as of today, punters visiting selected Carphone Warehouse stores will be able to sign on the dotted line to qualify for one of six models of free laptops, provided that they also opt in to a broadband package.

Carphone will be setting up separate sections in its high-street stores for The Broadband Shop, an area dedicated to selling mobile broadband services from T-Mobile, Orange, 3, and fixed line from Virgin Media, TalkTalk and AOL Broadband, much like the Virgin Mobile sections set up in certain Zavvi (née Virgin Megastore) outlets. The deal with Virgin will see Carphone being able to flog all four of the Virgin Media services in their own stores; that’s broadband, digital TV, fixed-line and mobile phone services.

Neil Berkett, action chief executive ay Virgin Media said: “By extending our product portfolio in-store and making it simple and easy for customers to sign up, we’re hoping Virgin Media will be at the top of shopping lists.” This mutually beneficial arrangement gives the second and third ranked broadband providers the opportunity to close the gap on market leaders BT.

Carphone head honcho Charles Dunstone believes that the free laptop offer will pay off, especially with younger surfers who want the freedom of mobile broadband: “Our research has shown that for people over 14, having a laptop is becoming more important than having a mobile phone,” says Mr Dunstone. “And they don’t want to wrestle with their siblings and their parents to look at websites like Facebook or YouTube.”

Carphone Warehouse’s new business and multi-channel director Andy Brem said that launch “this is only the start. We are doing with laptops and broadband what we did with mobile phones”.

Carphone Warehouse is to sell 50 percent of its retail business to giant US retail chain Best Buy for a cool £1.1bn, and plans to funnel the cash into an overhaul of its broadband infrastructure.

Carphone, who operate TalkTalk and own AOL’s UK broadband services, will keep the remaining 50 percent of their stake in their domestic retail business, which will eventually lead to Best Buy-branded stores opening up across in Europe; despite this, Carphone will hold on to all of its telecoms concerns.

It is thought that the majority of the investment will go toward getting ADSL2+ connectivity rolled out across both providers, as well as expanding availability through the LLU/BT Openreach program in order to keep up with providers such as Be Broadband, Sky and Virgin Media all of whom either offer ADSL2+ solutions or next-gen speeds.

Data from samknows.com reveals that TalkTalk have installed equipment in 1,632 exchanges to date, with another 31 currently awaiting installation. By comparison, AOL has equipment in 1,049 exchanges, with no more exchanges slated as of yet. This could all change in the coming months however; keep checking back here to see what services you can sign up for at your exchange.

AOL have just announced a new change to the pricing plan of their recently launched Wireless Flexi package, and their start-up Wireless broadband service. The cost for the first three months of both of these services has been reduced to just £4.99 – less than £15 for 3 months of broadband access – after which the standard £14.99 rate applies.

The new Wireless Flexi service is billed on a monthly basis, and it aimed at groups of people such as students, who may not be living at the same address for 12 or 18 months – the standard Wireless service is available on an 18 month contract.

Both Wireless and its Flexi equivalent both provide up to 8Mbps speeds with a 10GB monthly cap – that’s a pretty generous limit compared to the start-up packages of other providers. Both of these products naturally come with a wireless router, allowing up to 6 devices to share the same connection.

AOL will also be running with a new TV ad campaign to pimp these new prices, in an effort to distance themselves from Carphone Warehouse stablemates TalkTalk.

Carphone Warehouse, owners of ISPs TalkTalk and AOL UK, have dug their heels in over the recent demands from the government and the BPI to shop customers who illegally download copyrighted material over P2P networks.

In a statement, Charles Dunstone said that: “Our position is very clear, we are the conduit that gives users access to the Internet, we do not control the Internet nor do we control what our users do on the Internet,” and stated that should a legal decision to make a ‘three strike’ policy a requisite for ISPs happen, then Carphone would do everything in its power to challenge that:

“I cannot foresee any circumstances in which we would voluntarily disconnect a customer’s account on the basis of a third party alleging a wrongdoing. We believe that a fundamental part of our role as an ISP is to protect the rights of our users to use the Internet as they choose. We will fight any challenge to the sanctity of this relationship with every legal option available to us.”

The BPI’s response: “We passionately believe that working in partnership with ISPs to develop first class, safe, legal, digital music services is the way forward. TalkTalk claims it is their role to ‘protect the rights of their customers to use the internet as they choose’. We strongly disagree on this point when that usage is illegal. Contrary to TalkTalk’s claims, passing advice on to their customers is not ‘unreasonable’ or ‘unworkable’. We are not asking ISPs to act as the police. We are asking them to act on information we provide to them.”

Last week it was revealed that Virgin Media were only too keen to buddy up with the BPI – presumably because they want government to be on their side when the time comes to pass judgement on the numerous disputes with Sky. Carphone Warehouse is also the only ISP out of the three who have climbed into bed with the controversial Phorm – the others being Virgin and BT – who have gone out of their way to stress that an ‘opt-out’ will be available to all users.

Last week AOL, the Time-Warner affiliated company, not the UK arm owned by Carphone Warehouse, bought Bebo, the third biggest social networking site on the interweb, with around 40 million monthly users over the world. Randy Falco, chairman and chief executive of AOL, said: “Bebo is the perfect complement to AOL’s personal communications network and puts us in a leading position in social media.”

The deal marks a push by AOL revive itself as a brand, and to grow its social media business, which consists of AIM, a cross between messaging and social networking, and personal communications network ICQ, in a similar vein to the Myspace IM platform, which should have, but never really took off.

Myspace was, of course, snapped up by Sky owners News International, in the days before Facebook became the new kid on the social networking block.

A report by telecoms research body Point Topic says that Sky has retained its position as the fastest growing ISP in the UK, according to sales figures from the past five quarters. In the three months up to last December, the triple-play company netted a further 260,000 broadband customers, which equates to 42 per cent of new broadband customers during that period.

The success of Sky Broadband has largely been credited to the popular SeeSpeakSurf bundle, which sees broadband included free with Sky TV, their killer app, and fixed line phone calls. Sky was also the first ISP to offer free wireless routers to customers, allowing home networks to be set up quickly and easily. Rival providers Be, AOL, Tiscali and others quickly followed suit.

Sky entered the broadband market under its own name nearly two years ago, after buying Easynet for a cool £211 million. Sky wasted no time investing into the LLU scheme, unbundling at a furious rate. SeeSpeakSurf launched in 2006 and late last year, Sky announced that it had connected its millionth customer. Sky also purchased ADSL2+ ISP UK Online, who specialise in providing next-gen ADSL broadband to SME customers.